Mallory killed her boyfriend, Brian. She can’t remember the details of that night but everyone knows it was self-defense, so she isn’t charged. But Mallory still feels Brian’s presence in her life. Is it all in her head? Or is it something more? In desperate need of a fresh start, Mallory is sent to Monroe, a fancy prep school where no one knows her . . . or anything about her past.But the feeling follows her, as do her secrets. Then, one of her new classmates turns up dead. As suspicion falls on Mallory, she must find a way to remember the details of both deadly nights so she can prove her innocence-to herself and others. In another riveting tale of life and death, Megan Miranda’s masterful storytelling brings readers along for a ride to the edge of sanity and back again.

I enjoyed reading Fracture by Miranda and this book caught my eye as it sounded interesting. It’s not like anything I’ve ever picked up to read but I enjoyed Fracture enough that I wanted to check this one out.

This book follows Mallory as she transfers to her father’s old prep school, Monroe. Mallory is sent to Monroe because things have gotten pretty hard for her at home ever since…she killed her boyfriend, Brian. There are things about that night that Mallory can’t remember but she does remember that Brian is dead because of her. She knows that it was self defense but there are things from that night that are just outside her memory. Things with Brian weren’t all that great for Mallory, according to her best friend Colleen. Colleen wasn’t a fan of Brian and Mallory because Mallory wasn’t Mallory when she was with him and because of Brian’s violent history, the case was dismissed and Brian’s family was torn apart.

Brian’s mother went crazy and started harassing Mallory so much that Mallory’s parents had to get a restraining order and Brian’s brother Dylan was shipped to live with his father up in Massachusetts.

Dylan. The boy that should have been Mallory’s but he had a girlfriend. So Mallory moved on from Dylan…with his brother, Brian.

Dylan wasn’t too happy about it but what could he do? He was already in a relationship and so he passed on Mallory. Brian’s friends want to make sure that Mallory feels their grief and their anger so they give her a hard time, such a hard time that Mallory is shipped out.

Now, Mallory is miles away from the only home she’s ever known and she’s thrown into the mix that is Monroe Prep School. She doesn’t know anyone until she comes across someone she does know, Reid. Reid’s father and Mallory’s father were roommates back in their Monroe days and she used to see Reid every few years since they were little. The last time she saw Reid, she made a pass at him and he didn’t take it because well, they were at his father’s funeral. He was going through some stuff.

Now, it’s three years later and they’re going to school together. Reid wants to be her friend but Mallory is all kinds of messed up. She’s not sleeping and when she does sleep, she’s having nightmares about Brian. He’s haunting her every waking moment and she’s kind of taking a break from boys. Things at school aren’t going the way she’d thought they would because there are bullies here and one of those bullies seems to be out to get her. He makes her completely uncomfortable and he goes out of his way to make things hard for Mallory and to be honest, it didn’t fit with what I know about teens.

What I really didn’t understand is that Mallory killed Brian. She really did. She stabbed him and he bled out in her parents house. She’s dealing with the blood on her hands from that and she’s still getting bullied. Everyone that is bullying her, knows what she did and yet, they’re still bullying her. What’s wrong with this picture? You can bet your damn bottom dollar that if I knew that someone killed another person, in self defense or not…I would not be making fun of them, making things hard for them or anything. Unless, I wanted her to kill me too so why weren’t these kids afraid of Mallory?

It didn’t make sense to me.

I would think that it would be hard for Mallory to deal with this and the author did a really good job with making me feel Mallory’s pain and her issues but the whole thing with the kids and the bullying and the framing, I just couldn’t understand why they’d pick on someone who killed someone else.

Aside from the bullying, this book was interesting. It was really slow to pick up but before I knew what was what, I was invested in the story and even though I wasn’t completely satisfied with the way that things turned out (the whole thing with Dylan at the end gave me a total WTF moment) but still, I’m not sorry that I read this book. It was an enjoyable read and while it wasn’t perfect, it was still enjoyable. I enjoyed the romance between Reid and Mallory and the friendship between Colleen and Mallory. Those two are what friends are supposed to be like. Ride or die. That was those two and yeah, I liked this one.

Eleven minutes passed before Delaney Maxwell was pulled from the icy waters of a Maine lake by her best friend Decker Phillips. By then her heart had stopped beating. Her brain had stopped working. She was dead. And yet she somehow defied medical precedent to come back seemingly fine

-despite the scans that showed significant brain damage. Everyone wants Delaney to be all right, but she knows she’s far from normal. Pulled by strange sensations she can’t control or explain, Delaney finds herself drawn to the dying. Is her altered brain now predicting death, or causing it?

Then Delaney meets Troy Varga, who recently emerged from a coma with similar abilities. At first she’s reassured to find someone who understands the strangeness of her new existence, but Delaney soon discovers that Troy’s motives aren’t quite what she thought. Is their gift a miracle, a freak of nature-or something much more frightening?

For fans of best-sellers like Before I Fall and If I Stay, this is a fascinating and heart-rending story about love and friendship and the fine line between life and death.

I’ve been looking forward to reading this book and was happy when I finally picked it up. Delaney Maxwell fell into the lake and was under for eleven minutes before her best friend Decker was able to save her life.

Eleven minutes.

She should be dead but by some miracle, she didn’t die. She’s alive but she’s not exactly the same person that she was before the accident. She’s got a sixth sense for when people are going to die and her doctors and parents are starting to think that she’s crazy. She’s starting to think that she’s crazy.

Just like the lake fractured under her feet when she was trying to cross it, her life is fractured because everything is different for her now. She knows things, she sees things and she has no idea what to do about these things and the introduction of a new guy on the scene doesn’t really help matters.

He knows about her and he knows things that she knows and he’s got secrets but because she can’t really talk about anything with anyone else, she leans on Troy.

Lots of things pop off in this book that had me reading and reading and reading. The sexual (or teenage sexual tension I should say) between Decker and Delaney. All of the drama between Troy and Delaney. The stuff she was going through after the accident. Her parents thinking she was looney. Her doctor’s thinking the same thing. It all made for an interesting story and I was glad that I read this one but there were parts of the story that was hard for me to read.

Most of that was the back and forth between her and Decker. I’m all about the love interest. Romance between characters always gets me excited about reading a book. I don’t even mind love triangles as long as they’re written in a way that is believable and..right. So the romance between Decker and Delaney (if you could call it that) is very immature but still interesting. They’re best friends, you kind of know that he’s got a thing for her but you can’t be entirely sure because he’s very close mouthed about it.

The same goes for Delaney. She swears nothing is going on with her and Decker but the minute he moves on, she flips the eff out. So that’s what I mean about the whole back and forth stuff with those two. It goes on like that throughout the entire book and toward the end, I was getting fed up with it. I wanted the both of them to just come out and deal with it. Saying that, the ending left me perplexed. Perplexed in the sense that I didn’t quite know how to feel about the way that the book ended. I wasn’t disappointed but I wasn’t exactly thrilled either. You’ll have to read it to find out what I’m talking about but the ending and the frustrating relationship between Decker and Delaney then the whole Troy thing tainted my enjoyment some and that’s why I’m giving this book the grade that I’m giving it.

I did enjoy the book, I did enjoy getting to know all of the characters in this book but there were times that I wished that Delaney would have let Decker be there for her. There were times when I wished that Decker would come out and say what was on his mind about his feelings for Delaney and I never fully warmed up to Troy for him to be considered a third part to a love triangle for Delaney. Despite all of that, I thought the story was told in a way that kept me interested in what came next so I didn’t feel like this was a waste of time reading. I just wanted more from some things and less from others.

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